Real Estate Investing for Lazy and Poor Folks

Often times when I talk about real estate investing, I break the topic up for two primary groups of people: lazy folks and poor folks. I want to point out that I don't believe you can successfully become a real estate investor being BOTH lazy AND poor, but I know you can be successful using either one of these methods.

What do I mean when I say lazy folks and what do I mean when I say poor folks?

Lazy folks are people that have more money than time and they are willing to spend money to have things done for them.

Poor folks are people that have more time than money and are willing to do things to save or avoid spending money.

While I cover detailed examples, implementation strategies and more in other articles, courses and checklists, here I will present some very basic examples of what I mean.

Let's say you are trying to find great deals to purchase or wholesale as a real estate investor. What is an example of a lazy way of finding deals? Paying a bird-dog or wholesaler to find deals for you. Another example of a lazy method is to place an ad in the newspaper to have motivated sellers call you with properties they want to sell.

What's a poor way of finding great deals when you have more time than money to invest? Calling on "properties for sale" ads in the newspaper, calling "for rent" ads in the newspaper or on-line, or placing free ads on free classified websites are all good methods. Driving (or walking) around your town looking for vacant of distressed properties is also a good poor man's strategy.

Can you see that someone who has limited money to spend on starting their business, but who has a lot of time might be very attracted to the poor methods? Can you see that once your business is up, running and generating some cash flow that you might need to start leveraging your time by hiring out some tasks, employing more of the lazy methods?

Both methods can work, but each one utilizes different resources in different proportions: some use much more time and some use much more money.

Until my next post,

James